Feelings - deepening self-awareness in the early stages of psychotherapy

Important work you can do to get a fast start in psychotherapy

by Tom Cloyd, MS, MA - Counselor / Psychotherapist - Bellingham, Washington (360) 920-1226 - email: tc (AT) tomcloyd.com (please read about content licensing)

Introduction: Awareness, feelings, and psychotherapy

In the beginning stages of psychotherapy, one is often invited to become more aware of certain aspects of one's life. This increased awareness is a key part of the personal growth that characterizes successful therapy. When you know more, you can do more, and real change becomes more likely. It all begins with increasing self-knowledge by increasing awareness.

Although increased awareness could occur in several different areas of one's life (objective behavior and social relations being two of the most important), probably the most critical area of increased awareness is that of internal process, of "feelings", specifically. Feelings begin with a certain type of brain energy "output" - a response to stimulation by other parts of the brain. When we become aware of this energy response the result enters our awareness as a "feeling". Let me explain this a little.

Brain 101 - an easy introduction to what's really happening

The brain may be thought of as having three fundamental divisions - like a three-layer cake (described here in reverse order):

• the lowest part (brain stem and cerebellum) is the "body" brain - it directly manages major aspects of our bodies;
• the middle part ("limbic" system) is the "feeling and memory" brain - it produces our feelings and manages creation of memory;
• the top part ("cerebral cortex", also called "cerebrum") is our "thinking" brain - it manages recognition of everything in our perception, including those things about which we already know something. It also manages decision making about how we will respond to what we recognize.

In summary - just think "body - feelings - thinking", and you have a good, quick sense of the three core activities in which the brain engages.

In truth, these activities and parts of the brain are very involved with each other, with a great many interconnections, but this simple version of brain process has some very real advantages in helping us understand how to make better use of this marvelous organ we all have.

How the brain makes its living

All organs of our body do something practical and useful. For example, the lungs process gases, bringing oxygen into the body, and letting carbon dioxide and other gases out. The digestive tract processes ingested nutrients. The circulatory system processes blood. And so on…

So, what does the brain do - what does it "process"? Its "work" is simply information processing. It is the most complex known material construction, and the world's best computer. We have yet to replicate with any real skill many things the brain appears to do effortlessly - activities such as learning and using language.

The brain's information processing may be thought of as going from top to bottom. The first step is for energy to impact our sensory system, through our eyes, ears, taste buds, olfactory sensors (nose), tactile sensors (skin nerves), and the special sensory system we use to "feel" our own body from the inside-out. External energy contacting us is converted into nerve signals which go into the brain to be interpreted - in the topmost part of the brain. Once this "making sense" of incoming information is accomplished, the first stage of thinking is complete. We now know what we're confronted with - what we're seeing, hearing, or whatever.

The next stage is to decide what to do. Sometimes this involves formal thinking, but often it's carried out at a simple, unconscious level, which can happen quite quickly. For example, if one looks up and sees a tree branch falling out of the sky, little formal thought is required! If the "thinking" brain decides, by whatever means, that action is required, it signals the middle or "feeling" brain to make a feeling. Other parts of the brain, especially the bottom or "body" brain, respond to this feeling, and things can quickly get pretty exciting. Thinking, it turns out, is NOT what the brain does most of the time. It doesn't have to.

What feelings do

Feelings are like fuel in the engine of the mind. With feelings active in the brain, something can now HAPPEN. The lower brain is energized by the feelings - it's "motivated", at which point  something does happen. Note that a lot of this process I've just described happens outside of awareness. Most often, only rather small amounts of feeling are required to achieve the motivation to act. Consider, for example, how little you actually have to feel to reach for a glass of water on the table in front of you. It doesn't take much - so little, in fact, that we typically have no awareness of our feeling at all. This is all wonderfully efficient. If feelings are the "gas" in the engine of our mind, we usually get a lot of miles out of a small amount of feeling-fuel!

To make very clear the central role of feelings in the brain, consider what happens if the feelings stop - it you "run out of gas": things get really quiet in your brain. Movement tends to stop. There is little response to anything. Nothing is particularly rewarding. Life tends to be flat, grey, lifeless. If this experience goes on for long we may start to get rather irritated. We have a name for this condition: depression. Being stuck with it is awful, which is why no want wants to be depressed.

Feelings are the reason for therapy

People come to therapy because of their feelings. Put simply, they're having feelings they don't like, in quantities they can't handle. They can't fix the problem, and they're fed up. So, this is why in the beginning of therapy it can be so useful to enlarge one's awareness of feelings. Otherwise, it will as if you were trying to weed your garden with your eyes closed. You'll probably miss some of the bad stuff and pull up some of the good stuff, and that won't win you any prizes as a gardener. You will profit from becoming more aware of your feelings precisely because of the central role they play in your brain.

Many of us value thinking, and thinking certainly IS important, but only because we "like", or "enjoy", or "value" the process and result. Note that all those words in quotes are feelings-words. It's hard to talk about what we value without such words, because feelings give value. Discover what you have feelings about and you discover what you value.

So, for that reason, and for many others, let's begin working at discovering what feelings we're actually having. This will result in the experience of  "increasing self-knowledge by increasing awareness" which I spoke about in the first paragraph. But before we can go very far we'll need to solve the problem of what words we're going to use.

Language and feelings

There are at least hundreds of words for human feelings. That can be intimidating. What if there were a way to simplify this apparent complexity? Well, there is, fortunately. Decades of research have provided good evidence that there are probably only nine basic human feelings, although they often occur in mixtures, such as fear-anger, interest-disgust, surprise-shame, interest-shame, or even more complex combinations. Basic feelings can be handily grouped into positive, neutral, and negative.

What follows is a bit detailed and even abstract at times, but it's extremely useful, as I hope you'll get to find out. Here, then, is the list of the nine most basic human feelings, with brief definitions. The definitions I give here may seem a bit odd. They are written not so much to describe our conscious sensation when we're having the feeling (although a given definition may do that well) as to describe events in the brain, relative to rising, falling, and enduring levels of brain activity - neural activation. If you think briefly about the definitions you will likely find that they make a lot of sense. (These definitions are summaries of the statements of a renowned authority on feelings and the brain - psychiatrist D. L. Nathanson, in his book Shame and Pride (1992).)

POSITIVE FEELINGS

Interest - excitement: This happens when anything we're attending to becomes more intense.

Enjoyment - joy: This happens, curiously enough, when the brain quiets down, when brain activity reduces.

NEUTRAL FEELING

Surprise - startle: This is the briefest feeling, coming and going very quickly. It happens when we encounter an extremely sudden major increase in stimulation. Depending upon what it's combined with, it can be negative or positive in tone. By itself, because it's so brief, it is neither. It's main effect and function is to clear out from our brain and mind (consciousness) anything else we were feeling before the "surprise" was stimulated.

NEGATIVE FEELINGS

Fear - terror: This is triggered by an over-abundance of incoming information (which seems to be experienced by the brain as inherently threatening).

Distress - anguish: This is triggered by knowing something is wrong or missing. Its effect is to call attention to a constant fact that all is not well and that some action is required.

Anger-rage: This is caused by the highest levels of stimulation. A stimulation source, for example pain, which causes initial distress may, if prolonged, ultimately cause anger. The primary function of anger is to amplify both the problem and any response generated by it.

Dissmell: Triggered simply by bad smell. It provides an early warning of noxious substances, and acts to limit hunger. Dissmell and disgust (see below) may operate independently or together at different times.

Disgust: Coupled with dissmell at times, disgust can also act to limit the hunger. But it is much broader in scope, as its effect easily extends from food to anything we perceive as unwanted, undesirable, or toxic. This feeling usually functions to limit our contact with something.

Shame-humiliation: A critically important feeling which only works in relation to other feelings, primarily acting at least to partially inhibit positive feeling.

These "pure" feelings can be hard to describe in a few words. Nathanson's definitions may see a bit odd at times, because of their brevity and clinical nature, but they are very carefully worked out.

Another reason why they may seem odd is that feelings are not emotions, and one may be reading about a feeling but thinking about an emotion. An emotion can be particularly hard to define. It's the mix of feelings we have in certain contexts or situations. Consider "exhilaration", for example. For me, it's about skiing and cycling. For someone else, it's about riding fast on a horse, or gambling with large sums of money. From the point of view of feeling, it's about Interest, Excitement, and Fear, at the very least, but always in the context of a particular individual's personal history. You might well not make much sense of an emotion I feel in relation to something, and I may well, in a similar way, fail to understand all of your emotions, but we'd have NO trouble understanding each other's Fear - a much simpler thing.

Reviewing this list, and writing it out as a short list of merely nine terms, is an excellent idea at this point. You would do well to be familiar with these terms, in what follows below. We're about to make use of them.

Finding your feelings

In my own personal history, I had to practice before I was any good at consciously reading people's feelings, much less my own. Like many people, I was no more aware than I had to be, and the language I used was casual and not always accurate. There was a lot of room for improvement.

It didn't take long, however, for me to learn the trick, and then I was almost overwhelmed by the information I had at my disposal. People show their feelings a lot of the time, and usually without knowing it at all. This is because our faces are intimately connected to our feelings, and we tend simply to respond facially to what we're feeling. Learn to read faces and you'll be able to read feelings. Know that both feelings and the facial expressions that invariably go with them are with us a birth - we don't have to learn anything - and they are the same all over the world. This really IS a universal language. Let's learn to speak it!

How to begin? Let's start in a very simple way:

1. Take a piece of blank paper and just write down some words that describe the feelings or emotions you are aware of right now. Anything you write is acceptable. We just need to begin. It's often easier to get a sense of direction after one starts moving. Just notice what's inside your head. Probably the trickiest feeling to "get" is Interest, because it's rather calm and quiet. If all you're doing is reading this text, and thinking about it, the feeling you're most likely having is probably Interest. But look around inside your head. Most of my clients have rather complex feelings, at least at the beginning of therapy.

Here are some words you might write to describe the feelings you might be having right now:

Noise - rushing - sadness and heaviness - quietness - loneliness - fullness.

Or, you might write, in a somewhat different style, something like this:

Swirling, buzzing noise, like water running downhill fast - tightness and scaredness in my head and chest - letting go and settling down.

The two sorts of examples I've just given may not be at all the kinds of words you might choose. That's just fine! Your words are the best words, at this point, so it's best simply to write at this point what feels right for you, and that's something that I can't give an example of - you'll simply have to discover it. In the act of this discovering, you'll become more aware, so already this exercise will be working for you.

2. Now consider what you wrote. Work on it a bit, so that the words better suit what you're talking about. All of us find at times that the words we use to describe what's happening inside us are simply the words that are easiest for us to find in our mind, rather than the words that really are most descriptive, so it makes sense to "play" with your words a bit at this point.

3. Finally, see if you can find in your words, and in the feelings they describe, any of the nine feeling terms in the basic list. Expect to find other things as well - things that may not even be feelings! That's quite customary. If one wasn't entirely sure what a sheep looked like, a goat or two might well slip into the pen!

4. Do this exercise repeatedly. I'd recommend about 5 minutes at a time (or more, if you like), about three times a day, for perhaps two or three days or more. Repeated practice will quickly help you to gain familiarity with the basic terms, AND their occurrence in your life. You may find that certain feelings are very common for you, and that certain others rarely or never appear.

5. As a very useful alternative, try the exercise looking at other people. You may find that this is even easier! After all, you'll have their face to work with, in place of their internal information, which will be unseen by you. Faces, once you learn to read them, are rather easy.

Keep your sheets of paper, dated, in a folder. They can be productively reviewed, at the end of the day, or brought to therapy for review with your therapist.

What you stand to gain

Doing this ought to help you be much more sensitive to your own feelings and those of others. It ought to help you see something which initially seems impossibly complicated as really rather accessible and understandable. You're likely to find that the "meaning" of the moment is the "feeling" of the moment, and that your feelings have a wisdom to them that you've never really seen, until now. Remember what happens if the feelings go away. Nothing. Depression. And that's not good at all!

In the end, you may well develop a respect for feelings, yours and those of others, which has simply not been possible for you before. I know that that has been the effect on me of getting much more familiar with feelings and their names. I'm truly grateful (an emotion, which for me - the excitement/joy that occurs in the context of receiving gifts) for this familiarity and all that it brings to my life. I hope that this is your experience as well.

Tracking Form for self-monitoring of feelings

Name: ___________________________________

Day / Date: ____________________________

Approximate time of day of monitoring: ______________________________

Instructions: This form is simply for tracking - and the main reason to track feelings is to increase one's ability to know what's happening and what the different kinds of feelings are. It is assumed that one is familiar with the feelings, and can identify them with reasonable accuracy. Merely tracking feelings across several days will generally serve as excellent training in identifying what one is experiencing. Beyond that skill, it is of great interest to see WHAT feelings you are having, HOW MUCH you are experiencing, and how they CHANGE through the day and across several days.

Record, for each feeling, the score you give yourself on the following scale, when considering the following question:

Monitoring question: In the past 2-3 hours, how much of this feeling have I been experiencing?

Monitoring scale: ("0" means "none at all" - "10" means " as much as I could possibly feel"):

0----|----1----|----2----|----3----|----4----|----5----|----6----|----7----|----8----|----9----|----10

 

RECORD YOUR ANSWERS HERE:

 

1. Interest - excitement: ________

2. Enjoyment - joy: ________

3. Surprise - startle: ________

4. Fear - terror: ________

5. Distress - anguish: ________

6. Anger-rage : ________

7. Dissmell: ________

8. Disgust: ________

9. Shame-humiliation: ________